Cell Broadband Engine Architecture workshop
Need multicore performance? Want to learn a new and emerging technology and be an early evaluator? Join us for two days of technical training and explore the details of Cell Broadband Engine (CBE) programming with hands-on exercises. This workshop is for developers with advanced C and C++ skills who would like to experiment with the new CBE technology. It provides a comprehensive technical overview of the cell architecture, programming models, software development environment, cell-based blade server architecture and IBM offerings.
The Cell Broadband Engine Architecture has been designed to support a wide range of applications including digital media, entertainment, communications, medical imaging, security and surveillance, and HPC workloads. The first implementation, the CBE processor, is a single-chip multiprocessor with nine processor elements operating on a shared, coherent memory. Each CBE comprises a power processor element (PPE) and eight synergistic processor elements (SPEs).
The PPE contains a 64-bit Power Architecture core called PPU or PX, and it can run 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems and applications. It also manages system resources and SPE threads. It supports both the PowerPC instruction set and the Vector/SIMD Multimedia Extension instruction set.
The SPEs are independent processor elements which are optimized for running SIMD applications. To an application programmer, the CBE processor looks like a 9-way coherent multicore.
The PPE is used for control-intensive tasks and task switching while the SPEs are more adept at compute-intensive tasks and slower than the PPE at task switching. This specialization and the ability to join strength to work harmoniously yield a significant peak computational performance and chip-area-and-power efficiency that the CBE processor achieves over conventional PC processors.
What you will discover by attending this workshop
Cell multicore architecture
Cell programming models
Cell-based blade server
Cell standards like the application binary interface specifications, language extensions (SPE C, C++) and SPE assembly language specification
Cell software development environment
How to develop and build cell programs
How to apply various programming techniques to exploit cell features
Highlights
Cell microprocessor architecture including the PPE, SPE, memory flow controller, element interconnect bus, resource allocation management, I/O and memory interfaces
Cell programming models and software design methodology including the PPE programming models, SPE programming models, parallel programming models, and multitasking SPEs
Cell software development environment, development tools and system simulator
Installing and using the cell software development kit
Writing, compiling and executing cell programs
Using the cell full system simulator, systemsim, to examine cell internals and your program execution statistics
Cell sample workloads and application affinity
Prerequisites
Good technical understanding of computer architecture and programming practices
Familiarity with Power Architecture is helpful, but not required